Wanton Extinction: Foucault, Wynter, and the Anthropocene

This talk draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter to rethink the Anthropocene. Critically responding to the renaturalizing turn in recent feminist and queer thought, it seeks to articulate an ethics of living through a genealogical lens, engaging deep time and the fossil record as an archive of extinction.

Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Are the Lips a Grave?; Mad for Foucault; Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures; and Another Colette; and also serves as editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal in Continental Feminism. She has published academic articles on feminist theory, queer theory, Foucault, and ethics, as well as personal essays, creative nonfiction, and opinion pieces in literary journals and mass media venues.

Sponsored by the Mahindra Center for the Humanities (France and the World Seminar), the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment